ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes British attitudes towards Western Europe in terms of security during the period 1979-90, and to assess whether the Thatcher years constituted a marked change in British attitudes or policies. The insistence that Western Europe should continue 'to devise defence and arms control policies very much under the leadership of the U.S.', has led it further into isolation. Not even the part which Britain played in this period in promoting common foreign policies among the member states, or European Political Cooperation, could counterbalance the largely negative integrative role to which the reformulation and reassertion of national interests led it from 1979 onwards. The policies of the Thatcher governments towards Europe were a return to the certainties of the postwar settlement, and an implicit denial of a view of security which exhibited this interrelatedness. Moreover, growing isolation from Europe increasingly denied Britain the possibility of a lead role in forging a new European security consensus.
